Niala-1

Low lying fog crawled lazily through the valleys and divots in our hometown. Like the fog, the humans here had long grown accustomed to the rumors of flying specters in the distance in the cold winter months. Yet, the skies were clear above the haze – a perpetual grey of freedom that split their world from ours. There were mountains, marshlands, and miles of trees that covered our nomadic paths. Our campers may have moved from land to land, roaming nowhere, but here our hearts would always be. In a way, it reminded me of an old home I'd forgotten. I'd forgotten so much, but I would never forget the winters.

River channels and canals bore the broken down and abandoned barges of commerce long past. Pillars of docks and wharfs stood resilient from waters like tombstones in the rippling moonlight. In the mists, towering structures dedicated to hoisting, moving, and loading trade all became our perches through the cold months. It seemed all they were good for now.

I flew across the valley in the last motes of springtime in the hidden pockets of misty rain. The black of my wings threw patterns of starlight across the sky as my knifelike swoops drew me into twisting, curling aerial acrobatics. My lithe frame balanced and poised with fluid elegance in easy patterns.

“Why do you want to go out flying so much all the time?” one of the other ‘fledges,’ the teens, Nodak, asked me. His hearty wing strokes beat at the swirling mist, displacing it as his loping form drove clear swaths in the tepid play of it. The light bronze of his skin contrasted to the milky brown of his wings, making it hard to tell where his down started, and his skin ended. His similarly brown hair whipped about his face in a mane of shoulder-length tangles, so much thicker and lighter than my own.

“I get sick if I don’t!” I shouted out to him. Everyone always rolled their eyes when I said that, but it was true! Every day I had to let my wings free at least twice for a little while. I usually did that at night and during my morning showers. Sometimes I’d take a break midday to let them lash out into the world. The flying helped the most, though. The cold night air and pumping blood through my appendages felt sensual and curled tendrils of excitement between my feathers in teasing rivulets.

Nodak started to struggle. His broad wings and rounded tips pounded the air for traction. My own straight sharp things with pointed black feathers and silver tips didn’t beat but cut the air. They sliced the fog like knives and left polite darting holes in the wake of Nodak’s plowing path.

I eyed about, looking for purchase, and circled a section of fog to stir it up enough to see what lay beneath. The top of an old cargo crane creaked as I landed. It could hold more. Nodak swooped in after, his hands scrambling to grab at cables over the rusting beams of its bracing. His wings tucked in and shivered as he stared out through the grey and up into the starless sky.

“Think it’s going to rain?” My first impulse told me to answer, but a quick glance let me see the voluminous mess of his hair. Then, pawing over his head, he sleeked it back down as best he could and grumbled to little avail. With hair like that, I had no doubt as to why we—they—were called the wildlings.

I stood on the beam so perilously high over concrete and twisted shipyard metal with little fear, confident as I fished in my pocket for a hair tie. The soft edge of one graced my fingers, and I slipped up behind Nodak with a confident step. His locks curled in generous waves and tangled over one another as I drew my fingers through his thick mane of hair. Tiny knots prickled over my fingers. He smelled nice, like sour green apples and the bite of fresh ginger. His hair reeked of it, and I grumbled. For days after, I knew those cloying pleasant notes would linger on my hands no matter how much I washed them.

“Nesting?” He asked me. His grin was all flat teeth, sharp canines, and a teasing leering promise. In return, I grinned back, baring my own longer, sharper teeth. He shrank a bit from my smile. Most people did. Averting my eyes, I toyed my tongue over the prick of them.

“Bite me,” I told him as I jerked his hair fully back and tied the tie around the short ends of his hair. It mostly contained it, and I never wanted to nest like a brooding mother. I just wanted to hunt.

“Hmm, maybe. I bet you taste sweet.” He teased, reaching a hand to tug at one of my primary feathers. So, I jerked his hair in response and lifted my wings out of the way, pinning them to my back. Fidgeting, they rustled to lay flat for a moment. Then, something in my back twitched, and my wings made a sharp snapping sound.

Nodak flinched at the noise and my tug. “Ow! I don’t want to be the first Wildling to go bald! Chill.”

“Then stop being weird!” I whined as my wings snapped again, another instinctive clap. Short of drawing my wings back into my body, nothing could make me stop that when my emotions went sour.

They’re all being weird lately. I thought.

“Hush, or we’re going to get spotted. The last thing we need is another Mothman incident.”

I liked sitting in the moonlight like this, usually. Nodak nervously scouted for humans below. As flying creatures, they labeled us part ghost, part rumor, reaper, and in Kiromir's case, Mothman—I just knew him by 'Ada,' our word for dad.

“Mothman incident?” I perked up at the topic. He'd come by the Mothman name honestly, and nobody would let him live it down. I'd asked for the story a million times, and every time they promised to tell me when I got older. Nodak wasn’t much older than me, and I leaned into his back. I rested my hands on his shoulders. He shrank under my touch.

“Nevermind, Ni. It’s not really funny,” he said. Pink suffused the tan of his cheeks and dappled as his eyes glowed with a reddish light. His skin felt alive with a crackle and flicker of something warm like flames. I jerked my hands away and stepped back. Sometimes I forgot the boys had their fires.

Nodak blinked his eyes, and the red in them slipped away like the mists. As the only girl in my age group, I never really had the option of being prissy or feminine. Only just now had I started to start to delineate male from female in my one-track mind. Little moments like this continued to remind me of that difference.

I decided to drop the conversation as I looked out over the mists of the night and the peeking shapes of buildings in the town below. Up here was our world, our element. My wings snapped again and drew them to their full spread before diving in a deadfall off the side of the crane. I caught a draft from the cool sea air wafting in from the shore nearby and rode with the current in a curling stroke, making my way back home.

“Hey, wait up!” Nodak cried after me as I heard the creak and jostle of the crane from his takeoff. A loud and alien twang sounded through the mists.

“How about you catch up?” I rolled in the air and looped back to hover over his struggling form. His flapping wings amused me and generated a small pocket of air that I rose quickly on. Another Wildling couldn’t do this, glide on another.

He let himself drop a few feet with a shrug of his wings, and my slipstream ended with a tumble. He caught me mid-roll by my arm and swooped in for a rough landing, tumbling into the grass. I had been laughing, but Nodak just went cold and silent.

I struggled to my feet. “Oh come on, we were close to the gr—”

Nodak wasn’t looking at me, and I turned my head to see where he gazed. Another one of the fledges, my arguably best friend since ever, Gaffriel, stood stone-faced near our barracks. Nodak’s upper lip twitched, and he drew his wings with a rolling hitch of his shoulder.

“You ok, Nodak?” I didn’t know what bad blood had started boiling between the two of them, but I wished they’d just get a room and get it over with.

Nodak glanced over at me and then back to Gaff. “Peachy.” He dusted himself off, shoved his hands in his pockets, and loped off towards his barrack.

I shrugged and went off towards mine. I didn’t have the energy left to figure out why the boys were acting weird. Still, Gaffriel’s eyes followed me, and his trailing step didn’t lag far behind as I passed him.

“You going to bed?”

“Yeah.” I kept my tone flat. Gaffriel and I hadn’t really gotten along too well in the past few months, year even. His fires and magic had come in a year ago, and he was too desperate for mine to arrive, wanting me to grow up a little faster. It made me excited at first, then sad, and now it annoyed me. Just his presence alone made some urge within me—my wings snapped sharply.

He flinched at the sound but continued on. “Your wings are looking a little rough,” he said as he approached me and halted. His nose twitched. I could smell it too: sour green apples, the spice of ginger, none of the sweetness.

“You smell like Nodak.” It had been a statement, not an accusation, but my stomach did knot up.

Why do I feel guilty!?

“Yeah?” I walked over and wiped my hands down the front of his shirt, “And now you do too.”

The result was the same disgust I’d felt, but beneath it laid a coiling mote of absolute joy that I had touched him. He struggled out of the shirt and made a noise in his throat. He was more freckle than Wildling with the dusting paths of them sprinkled over his cheeks, shoulders, clavicles, forearms, and hands. The stark tattoo marking that held his wings dashed out proudly and confidently in a playful spread over his shoulder blades.

I stared at him for a lingering moment as my face fell into an extremely unimpressed expression.

Yeah… no. I’m not unpacking all this right now.

I stepped a few feet away into the inset doorway to my room. I shut the door with a sharp clip that reminded me of my wings.

The next morning I walked across the lands surrounding a derelict military base. It had been several things over the years. Still, I only ever knew it as ‘home.’ Small buildings and homes dotted the expansive landscape of our base, intermingled with looming concrete half-buried buildings and structures repurposed into small apartment-type things, the barracks. Ramshackle walls and leaning structures punctuated clusters of development between large swaths of open grass and sloping hillsides.

Despite having lived in my tiny room in the barracks for the past two years, surrounded by all the fledges, our youth, I couldn’t call it home. All my best memories came from the building before me, Kiromir’s home, a long premanufactured rectangle of a thing near the edge of the base. I made my way towards it as my hopes soared at the sight of my dad’s old camper sitting out front with the hood up. For twelve years, this sight had greeted me at the end of spring, signaling the beginning of summer migration.

I hadn’t thought of my old room in ‘the grousing hut’ in a few months. There, I used to wake every morning to the milling-about sounds of Kiromir getting a shower.

“It’s seven o eight,” I told my younger self, smiling at the ceiling. A clatter of a shampoo bottle falling to the floor, a short swear, and a scramble to pick it up alerted me of Kiromir’s presence. I could set my clock by him.

“MORNING, ADA!” I had shouted almost every morning.

His muffled voice thrummed through the wall. “Go back to sleep, kiddo. You don’t have to be up with me yet.”

I did, though. I convinced myself that Kiromir needed me every day by giving myself little chores to do. I started with the night’s dishes, scrubbing them one by one and sticking them in our small drying rack with our silverware. Then, I went to our trash cans, all three sitting in the corner, and sorted through our recycling. A tin can sat atop the trash, and a plastic wrapper sat in our compost. I knew it had been him because I couldn’t eat any of that stuff. So, one by one, I bagged them up and took them out towards the back of the barracks, where all our other trash went. The compost smelled rank, and I made a mental note to tell ada to have someone turn it.

The gravel curve of the road leading free of the base sat still and empty, unstirred by the morning cars leaving to take the kids to school. I squinted about to our parking lot at the lanky children bustling about to get into vehicles and waved to a familiar set of hazel eyes and red hair.

“Ni!” A voice rang out, and arms signaled back at me.

“Morning!” I shouted. One of the adults walked by, cuffed him upside the back of his head, and gestured for him to get into the car. I smiled. Gaffriel always made the best kinds of trouble. I walked away and headed back to the cabin to get out of my pajamas.

I dressed in jeans and a holy shirt. The tattered back left plenty of room for my wings to blossom free if I needed. At fourteen-ish, the soft fabric brushing over my chest made me feel self-conscious on its own, and I kept a little bit of wrapping around myself for ‘modesty’s sake.’ The boys had started to hit that awkward age around me, which somehow dictated that I needed to wear more pieces of clothing to compensate for their poor behavior.

Once dressed, I walked through the creaking hallway towards our living room that divided the building. The furthest left of the building was Kiromir’s room at the end of a narrow hallway. The bathroom came next, accessible from both inside his bedroom and from the living room. Then came the kitchen, and a small door next to the pantry led into my bedroom. It wasn’t much, but that was ‘the grousing hut.’

Its namesake came from the living room's large window, a thick thing with a slot at the bottom and a metal circle at the center drilled full of holes. It had been a ticket booth at one point, but now people just used it to slip angry notes and anonymous messages to Kiromir about problems in the flock and on the base. I approached the window and saw a few notes lying on the ledge just inside the window next to our two perpetually dying houseplants. I wish I knew what kind of plant they were so I could take better care of them, but despite anything I did, they never grew enough leaves to tell. Kiromir wouldn’t let me toss them out, though.

I opened the folded notes and read through them. First, Dimal’s home had a hot water problem. The following paper had been a noise complaint, so I read the first two lines and stacked the paper in the ‘cohabitation issues’ pile. New couples could get loud at times. With pink cheeks, I looked back at the letter. Unfortunately, It wasn’t a new couple… I politely moved the paper off to the side into a ‘Thanus’ pile.

Kiromir’s best friend and second in command had a way with people, and sometimes he could solve problems better than Kiromir. Especially when it concerned his brother Dimal and his partner, Letti. Thanus could be the one to have that talk with them about toning it down. Thanus had a lot of stops to make today. He handled peacekeeping and the occasional telling his brother to pipe down. Tensions always ran high after the migrations ended.

The rest of the letters were trivial things, a thank you for fixing something, a few crude jokes that I tossed away, and a little thinly scrawled note that read, “I think you’re the prettiest woodpecker in the whole flock.” I squinted at it and tossed it in the trash, too. I didn’t like being teased. There were only four boys it could have been from, and three of them were currently on the shortlist for receiving my boot. The fourth didn’t have the stones to do anything like that.

Calling it good, I made my way to the icebox and opened the ancient thing. Staring in, I found a few Tupperware containers near the bottom over the nearly-melted ice-pan. Kiromir would just have to refreeze it when he got out of the shower. I busied myself with sweeping around the house and making sure things stayed clean-ish. I started a coffee pot for him and wiped down the counters. Kiromir paid one of the women to clean the hut once a week, but she couldn't do as much between her heavy belly and worried partner. Kiromir still paid her all the same because children in these times were a blessing, and in no way could he ever ‘punish’ someone for bringing new life into this world. As long as Kiromir kept the ‘nesting’ and ‘housewife’ comments to himself, I had been happy to clean.

I grabbed one of the Tupperware containers and, despite there being a communal kitchen to eat in, I ate separately from them. I couldn’t eat a lot of the things they did.

They had yogurt and fruits, rare meat and vegetables. I couldn’t handle dairy at all, and the mere thought of flame touching my food made my stomach twist. I sat down at the table, tucked my legs up under myself, and leaned over the container to eat. Kiromir always came out at about that time

“Morning, kiddo.” He said, grabbing a mug off the edge of a kitchen counter right where I left it before pouring himself a cup. Coffee; I loved the smell of it and the taste of it, but I always had to stop at a sip.

I loved my life and the comfortable rhythm I had with Kiromir. But that day changed it all. He walked over to the table and sat next to me, watching as I ate something too obscenely raw to eat around the others. Kiromir stole a bite of what I ate and shrugged. He didn’t mind the taste of it.

“Elders wanna see us,” He told me.

“What for?” I swallowed hard as the food went down smooth and satisfying. It may be the only real food I got to eat that day, but I didn’t need to eat that often, either.

“No clue.” He shrugged, but a guilty look tickled at the edges of his senses, and he reached out to ruffle over my hair. I snapped at his hand, threatening to bite, and he shoved me a little, teasingly.

“Come on!” He finally told me.

“Redo the icebox first,” I told him, and he rolled his eyes, flipping the door to the unit open. He stared down at the puddle of water in the ice bin, and with a bare roll of his wrist, he plunged his hand down to the bottom, and the water went still and cold with a flicker of blue light. A soft fog rolled off of it, and he closed the door.

“At least it’s good for something,” he grumbled before he ushered me out.

Who needed fancy new refrigerators when your dad is a walking ice machine, huh?

Ranna and Touk, two of our flock's oldest members, sat waiting for us as we approached their building. It was a wing of bedrooms, communal baths, and a cordoned dining area that lead back into one of our gyms. This one was reserved for the hunters only, but Kiromir let me use it when I sometimes needed to stretch out in private.

Ranna and Touk were Swans, what we called gay. They mothered all the kids in the flock, especially me.

“You know what I’ve got waiting for you,” Ranna told me, and my eyes went wide with delight.

I loved coming home from Migration!

Blackberries.

We ushered inside, and Kiromir and I sat down at one of their tables in the dining area just inside the door. Touk sat across from us, and Rana brought in a few big bowls of thick currant colored stuff in plastic butter containers. Pure frozen blackberries, fresh-picked this summer while we were away, teased at my senses.

“So, Niala, you may have noticed that some of the fledges in your group are getting their fires.”

“Yep,” I spoke through a mouthful of the stuff. I loved blackberries, especially the wild ones that grew around the edges of the barracks and at the corners of our property. Thick vines crawled over everything and draped sour little green berries that teased me up until the day we left for Migration. The blackberries outside my barracks had draped thorned vines over everything with choking clutter. Then, come spring, I smelled the rich flowers, and just before the Migrations, they bore tiny little green berries that dared me to taste one. I recall I had, as a child, and found only sour bitterness. I only lamented over the droves of prickling vines that covered everything. When the elders told me that those terrible green things were blackberries, I had cried for days that I couldn't taste them when we went on the Migration.

When we returned, Torga and Ranna had picked a half dozen gallon-sized plastic bags full of ripe fruit and froze them for me. Then, for months I'd sneak off to their barracks at any given chance for Ranna to run them through a blender with some juice or water to make a sort of sorbet for me. Ever since, when we got ready for the Migration, I bustled with excitement to come home and taste Ranna's treat. Of course, I was older now, but I knew they'd pick them for me just the same as always. Torga, especially, loved to spoil me and make me happy.

I shoveled a thick mouthful in and swallowed, shivering so hard my wings threatened to lash out, “Well, it’s time we give you this.”

Raw delight passed over their alike faces as Ranna passed a small silver key on a ring to me, scooting it over. Suddenly, the bottom fell out of my world, and I felt dizzy. In slow motion, my spoon fell from my limp fingers.

“But I’m fourteen! I don’t get one until I’m fifteen!” I argued, and their faces fell into somber ones.

“You’re ready to be on your own.” They were adamant. I tried every excuse, every reason. I needed Kiromir. Their only consolation was Kiromir’s biggest concern.

“What if I have the bad nightmares?” I asked. Sometimes I woke people with the screaming.

“That’s why Gaffriel has the room next to yours.” They assured me, and Kiromir bristled. He wanted to say something, puffed up with indignance, and one sharp look from Touk had him backing down.

“Mir! She goes with her age group, end of story. You’re mothering her too much, and she needs this.” So they argued, and it became less of what I wanted and more of what they expected of me.

It had been hard, and Kiromir took forever to remember how to care for himself again. I think I had been mothering him just as much, either that or he got depressed and let the grousing hut get filthy until his housekeeper returned. I don’t think he kept drinking coffee once I stopped making it.

Now, almost two years later, at sixteen, I still wished I lived with my ada. But, when the summers came around, I could stay with him again for those few months of the year.

Kiromir had his RV out of the storage shed. It was a cramped space, but we shared it well together. He'd never found himself a bondmate, no woman to share his bed with, so I never fretted over invading his life. Things went at their own pace for us.

Every year he went on Migration searching for a bondmate, and every year he came back single. I think he'd stopped trying, but half the tribe seemed to believe that Kiromir didn't know something about himself that everyone else did. If they knew something, his mother knew nothing. She always tried to play matchmaker. For now, though, he was happy with how things were. As our flock leader, he had too much to worry about for both our clan and my sake.

I packed my belongings in the cool spring air. The smell of salt and seaweed in the distance from the ocean called to me. It overpowered the dankness of the barracks. I wanted to drift above the waves in the cool night air, not pack. As for possessions, I didn't have much out of necessity. I didn't technically exist, nor did any of us. We were the Wildlings. We were wild, free, and insubstantial.

"Ada!" I called out to Kiromir. His sun-weathered back bent low over the motorhome chassis with a tool in one hand and his head in the other. Something always went wrong with our RV come the start of the traveling season. Kiromir had named it the "Chata Ryel Nah' machine'. Our swears were kind of vague, but as far as severity went, that ranked right up there with the f-word and the C-word having a baby and naming it after a German dictator. Thanus called his a 'Vardo' because he heard that’s what the Romani called them. We didn't know much of them. Our paths crossed occasionally, and I had fond memories of playing with a few of their girls as they gawked over my tattoos and giggled over our boys. Our men were fairly attractive by human standards, but that's not what we looked for in a mate. We saw only 'The three F's': feathers, frolic, and fires—our word for magic.

Kiromir turned to look at me. His ashen brown hair spilled down the back of his neck, contrasting neatly to the ruddy tan of his skin. His wings were drawn by magic into striking tattoos that spread wickedly in tribal lines across his back. The sharp shape of wings spread below his shoulder blades in dark ink tones, much like flowing marks on his arms and legs of bands and feathers. His dark-rimmed eyes cut to me, and frustration boiled in his expression. His mood was tense and anger flaring, but he softened when I dropped my pack of things. Despite having lived separately for the past two years on the base, he welcomed me back with open arms for the traveling season, just like every year. It'd remain that way with us traveling together until one or both of us found a bondmate. Then, I would travel with another family or I wouldn't travel at all… I might find a bondmate in a flock that didn't travel or a flock that traveled in a different route. That prospect scared me. It was a woman's duty to leave her tribe for her bondmate's.

The feathers he'd woven into his braid were silvery grey, plucked, and shed from his own wings. The ones that I kept woven into my short-shorn hair onto my long side bangs were like my own wings, sharp and black as night with silver striped bases. Since mine differed from the rest of the flock, It served as a constant reminder that I was different when my wings were drawn into my ikris tattoos.

My tattoos, like theirs, contained the mystery of my wings when I drew them in. We called the marks' Ikris.' Mine were darker, sharper, cut, and dyed into my flesh by some little-understood magic. Theirs were a flowing spread of lifted wings, mine a drawn pair separated by a spear. I had mine since they’d found me, and Kiromir had gotten his, like everyone else, when he was two, and they faded in.

"Hold this for me, Ni," Kiromir said by way of greeting as I kicked my bag of belongings further into the door.

I reached my hand out, awkwardly fighting fingers for space and sight as his wrench tweaked some new part that he'd just put in. It said a lot about how much I trusted him to blindly stick my fingers into any small place that he had a tool.

"I thought you had this done days ago!" Secretly I felt a little excited that we may have to stay behind another day.

"I thought I did, too. I just got back from the auto store because it needed new air filters," Kiromir grumbled.

The chipped plastic frame of an air filter lay at my feet. As I moved, a piece of it crunched underfoot. It had dry rotted rubber bands, duct tape, and coffee filters in place of actual filter material. This looked very much like something Dimal, his childhood friend, would have done.

"Dimal?" I asked. Kiromir's shoulders tensed. I'd struck a nerve.

Yep.

For all his carefree laughter and jovial nature, Dimal did lazy and careless things. The phrase 'half-ass' described him to a ‘t,’ and the macgyvered air filter was a prime example of a half-done job. Kiromir would be at Dimal's home shouting at him at the top of his lungs right now if not for the fact that his bondmate, Letti, had only just had a baby a few weeks ago. That, and she would probably step in and try to get into the fight that would eventually break out. Letti was a scrapper like that. One day, I wanted to be just like her.

I'd never have her sandy blonde locks or fierce green eyes. I just had limp black hair. Her wings, their own owlish shade of caramel brown and white banding, were full and filled the skies. Mine? They were black and silver, magpie-looking things. They had wings like doves. Mine were like a woodpecker. She stood tall and lean. I was slight and wiry; I hated the looks I got.

"Maybe it's a sign we should stay behind this year," I said before turning my focus back to where my hands were.

His oil-blacked knuckles tensed, and shoulders braced as he wrenched the bolt of some kind of band free.

"Fat chance," he muttered, spitting a low swear beneath his breath, "Alsooth!"

When frustrated, he always used Wildling swears; the creator knows I'd never gotten entirely comfortable with them. Letti could turn it into an art, though. She composed obscenities like a poet. They were clumsy on my lips, and I swore like most of the kids, like a human. However, their words had more bite to them. Ours sounded like a song.

A band came free with a twang. Hot black dust flew up in our faces, and we drew back to cough.

"Chata, ryel nah!" he said in sharp tones beneath his breath. The machine earned its name again. I sighed as a soft smile crossed my lips.

It reminded me of the first day we'd met, nearly twelve years ago, his clumsy Wildling words and anger fierce in his eyes. It's why I hadn’t feared him when he got upset like most of the flock did. I'd witnessed his genuine anger. I'd seen magic and fire in his eyes.